Th e Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany Monographs in German History

Volume 1 Volume 17 Osthandel and Ostpolitik: German Foreign Trade Policies Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany in Eastern Europe from Bismarck to Adenauer Cornelie Usborne Mark Spaulding Volume 18 Volume 2 Selling the Economic Miracle: Economic Reconstruction A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reform and and Politics In , 1949–1957 Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany Mark E. Spicka Rebecca Boehling Volume 19 Volume 3 Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and Art From Recovery to Catastrophe: Municipal Stabilization in Hamburg’s Public Realm 1896-1918 and Political Crisis in Weimar Germany Mark A. Russell Ben Lieberman Volume 20 Volume 4 A Single Communal Faith? Th e German Right from Nazism in Central Germany: Th e Brownshirts in Conservatism to National Socialism ‘Red’ Saxony Th omas Rohrämer Christian W. Szejnmann Volume 21 Volume 5 Environmental Organizations in Modern Germany: Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain Hardy Survivors in the Twentieth Century and Beyond and the German States, 1789–1870 William T. Markham Andreas Fahrmeir Volume 22 Volume 6 Crime Stories: Criminalistic Fantasy and the Culture of Poems in Steel: National Socialism and the Politics of Crisis in Weimar Germany Inventing from Weimar to Bonn Todd Herzog Kees Gispen Volume 23 Volume 7 Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and “Aryanisation” in Hamburg Nationalism, 1848–1884 Frank Bajohr Matthew P. Fitzpatrick Volume 8 Volume 24 Th e Politics of Education: Teachers and School Reform in Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise and Weimar Germany Participation in the GDR Marjorie Lamberti Esther von Richthofen Volume 9 Volume 25 Th e Ambivalent Alliance: , the Banned in : Literary Censorship in Imperial CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949–1966 Germany, 1871–1918 Ronald J. Granieri Gary D. Stark Volume 10 Volume 26 Th e Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, After the ‘Socialist Spring’: Collectivisation and Economic and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898–1933 Transformation in the GDR E. Kurlander George Last Volume 11 Volume 27 Recasting West German Elites: Higher Civil Servants, Learning Democracy: Education Reform in West Germany, Business Leaders, and Physicians in Hesse between 1945–1965 Nazism and Democracy, 1945–1955 Brian M. Puaca Michael R. Hayse Volume 28 Volume 12 Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Th e Creation of the Modern German Army: General Authenticity and Performance Walther Reinhardt and the , 1914–1930 Timothy S. Brown William Mulligan Volume 29 Volume 13 Th e Political Economy of Germany under Chancellors Th e Crisis of the German Left: Th e PDS, Stalinism and Kohl and Schröder: Decline of the German Model? the Global Economy Jeremy Leaman Peter Th ompson Volume 30 Volume 14 Th e Surplus Woman: Unmarried in Imperial Germany, “Conservative Revolutionaries”: Protestant and Catholic 1871–1918 Churches in Germany After Radical Political Change in Catherine L. Dollard the 1990s Volume 31 Barbara Th ériault Optimizing the German Workforce: Labor Administration Volume 15 from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle Modernizing Bavaria: Th e Politics of David Meskill and the CSU, 1949–1969 Volume 32 Mark Milosch Th e Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany Volume 16 Katie Sutton Sex,Th ugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll. Teenage Rebels in Cold-War Mark Fenemore THE MASCULINE WOMAN IN WEIMAR GERMANY 

Katie Sutton

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford Published in 2011 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

©2011 Katie Sutton

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sutton, Katie. Th e masculine woman in Weimar Germany / Katie Sutton. p. cm. — (Monographs in German history ; v. 32) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-120-0 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-85745-121-7 (ebook : alk. paper) 1. Sex role—Germany—History—20th century. 2. Women—Germany—History—20th century. 3. Lesbians—Germany—History—20th century. 4. Gender identity—Germany— History—20th century. 5. Germany—History—1918–1933. I. Title. HQ1075.5.G3S88 2011 305.40943’0904—dc22 2011000413

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN: 978-0-85745-120-0 hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-121-7 ebook CONTENTS

List of Figures vi Acknowledgments viii

Introduction “Th e Masculinization of Woman” 1

Chapter 1 “Which One Is the Man?” Th e Masculinization of Women’s Fashions 25

Chapter 2 “In the Beginning Th ere Was Sport”: Th e Masculinized Female Athlete 66

Chapter 3 “My Emil Is Diff erent”: Queer Female Masculinities in the Weimar Media 90

Chapter 4 Th e Trouser Role: Female Masculinity as Performance 126

Chapter 5 Beyond Berlin: Female Masculinities in Weimar Fiction 151

Conclusion 181 Bibliography 186 Index 197 FIGURES

Figure I.1. “Lotte at the Crossroads.” Simplicissimus, 4 May 1925, 79. 2 Figure 1.1. “Th e Mixed-up Sex.” Uhu, July 1926, 103. 31 Figure 1.2. “Modern Couple.” Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 9 May 1926, 608. 32 Figure 1.3. Cover image, Garçonne, February 1931. 33 Figure 1.4. “‘Miss Germany’ 1932?” Das Magazin, January 1932, 6806. 35 Figure 1.5. “Th e Latest Acquisition of the Masculine Woman—the Tu xedo.” Das Magazin, August 1926, 761. 36 Figure 1.6. “Now Th at’s Enough! Against the Masculinization of Woman.” Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 29 March 1925, 389. 38 Figure 1.7. “What Do You Say about Fräulein Mia?” Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 13 November 1927. 39 Figures 1.8 and 1.9. “Th e Elegant Woman of Today: In the Morning and—the Same Woman (with White Wig) in the Evening—!” Das Magazin, October 1925, 74–75. 40 Figure 1.10. E. Th öny, “Hirschfeldiana.” Simplicissimus, 1 April 1921, 11. 42 Figure 1.11. “Th e Lady of 1925.” Das Magazin, January 1926, 54. 47 Figure 1.12. E. Th öny, “How Bourgeois—the Broad’s Wearing a Bosom,” Simplicissimus, 18 May 1925. 50 Figure 1.13. , “Th is Issue Belongs to the Lady.” Simplicissimus, 13 February 1928. 51 Figure 1.14. E. Schilling, “Berlin W.” Simplicissimus, 27 November 1932, 417. 53 Figures | vii

Figure 1.15. “Naturburschen wanted…” Uhu, August 1931, 25. 56 Figure 1.16. “Th e Story of the Braid that was Chopped Off and then Grew Back.” Uhu, March 1933, 78. 59 Figure 2.1. “A Boxing Star.” Das Magazin, May 1925, 38. 69 Figure 2.2. Steinert, “Women’s Sport.” Ulk, 19 August 1921, 131. 73 Figure 2.3. “Th e Modern Sporting Lady.” Die Dame, First April Issue 1926, 8. 76 Figures 2.4 and 2.5. “One and the Same Woman: Hurdling Champion Mrs Engelhardt-Becker in Action and at the Domestic Ironing Board.” Uhu, April 1933, 10–11. 83 Figure 2.6. “Sporting Camaraderie between Man and Woman: Th e Young Generation on the Sporting Fields.” Uhu, June 1933, 19. 85 Figure 3.1. “Th e Poet.” Ulk, 2 December 1927, 375. 98 Figure 3.2. “Th e Infl uence of Inner Secretion on Body and Soul.” Uhu, November 1924, 89. 104 Figure 3.3. “Spring 1926: Even the Stork Is Confused!” Ulk, 12 March 1926. 106 Figure 3.4. “‘Captain Barker,’ the London Fascist Leader.” Uhu, May 1929, 25. 114 Figure 3.5. Cover image, Garçonne, October 1930. 118 Figure 4.1. “Th e Boy: Photograph of the American Star Miss Percy in Flattering Costume.” Das Magazin, June 1925, 67. 131 Figure 4.2. “Rahna.” Das Magazin, September 1927, 1337. 135 Figure 4.3. Manuela during rehearsal, Mädchen in Uniform. (Germany, 1931) Dir. Leontine Sagan. 145 Figure 4.4. Manuela as Don Carlos, Mädchen in Uniform. (Germany, 1931) Dir. Leontine Sagan. 146 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research for this book was enabled by funding from the German Academic Ex- change Service (DAAD) and the Australian government. Institutional support was provided by the University of Melbourne, and by the following German institutions, whose archivists, librarians, and curators I would like to thank for assisting me in my research and granting permission to reprint images from their collections: the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin together with the BPK Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, the libraries of the Humboldt-Universität and Freie Universität, the Berlin Kunstbibliothek (SMB), the Deutsche Kinemathek, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Leipzig, and the Lesbenarchiv Spinnboden (Berlin). I am extremely grateful to a number of individuals who read and com- mented on various versions of the manuscript. My deepest thanks go to Alison Lewis for her encouraging and thought-provoking feedback throughout the life of this project. Many thanks also to Heather Benbow, Birgit Lang, Leo Kret- zenbacher, Sara Lennox, Kerstin Barndt, the anonymous readers for Berghahn Books, and several members of Women in German for their helpful comments. In addition, I would like to thank Erhard Schütz for advice on source materials, Brangwen Stone for her marvelous proofreading, and the careful copyeditors at Berghahn. My family has been very supportive and I thank them here, as well as Helen and Tassilo Bonzel, Maria Schmillenkamp, Udo Tober, and Omama, who shared with me the story of how she snuck off to Cologne to get her fi rst Bu- bikopf. Finally, my wholehearted thanks go to Katharina Bonzel, who supported this project from start to fi nish in so many ways. Earlier versions of several sections of this study have previously appeared in German Politics and Society, the Edinburgh German Yearbook, From Weimar to Christiania: German and Scandinavian Studies in Context (ed. Florence Feiereisen and Kyle Frackman, 2006) and Quer durch die Geisteswissenschaften: Perspektiven der Queer Th eory (ed. Elahe Haschemi Yekani and Beatrice Michaelis, 2005). Introduction

“THE MASCULINIZATION OF WOMAN” 

Th e de-womanization of woman—her emergence from the realm of the four big “Ks”— children, kitchen, cellar, church [Kinder, Küche, Keller, Kirche]—is a worldwide phenom- enon. … [T]his is the New Woman, who on both sides of the Atlantic has ordered herself to appear hiplessly thin and lithe, and who, with her short hair and long strides, in both the Old World and the New, seeks to resemble a boy. Rudolph Stratz, Die Woche, 7 February 1925

Th e masculinization of woman displaces masculinity, and the weak strong sex stands baf- fl ed in the face of this ambush. Anita Daniel, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 31 August 1924

The “masculinization of woman” (Vermännlichung der Frau) was central to rep- resentations of the changing female ideal in post–World War I Germany. Indeed, so often were variations on this phrase cited in the 1920s popular media that it is safe to assume that it was a cliché that had burned itself well into the national psyche. A cartoon published in the satirical journal Simplicissimus in 1925, at a point when anxieties about gender merging and female masculinization were reaching a climax, exemplifi es this phenomenon. Entitled “Lotte at the Cross- roads,” it depicts a slender, short-haired woman in masculine jacket and tie, one hand holding a cigarette and the other in her pocket, as she ponders whether to enter the toilet door designated “For Ladies” or “For Gentlemen” (see Figure I.1). By inviting readers to ridicule Lotte’s masculine attire, her emulation of

Notes for this section begin on page 21. 2 | Th e Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany

Figure I.1. “Lotte at the Crossroads.” Simplicissimus, 4 May 1925, 79. Source: BPK Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte masculine gestures and habits, and her inability to pass this most fundamental of gender “tests,” this image points eff ectively to the perceived cultural threat posed by the masculine “New Woman” of interwar Germany. While some commentators used the symbolic power of this fi gure in her short skirt and pageboy haircut to enthuse about women’s entrance into nontradi- tional, “masculine” fi elds of work, leisure, or consumption, by more conservative commentators she was held up as a threat to, and a warning against deviating too far away from, traditional ideas about men’s and women’s roles. Such confl icting accounts fed into wider debates concerning the state of Western civilization and the health and fertility of the German “race” following the rupture and trauma of the war, with commentators delighting in contrasting the traditional, maternal or virginal woman of the Wilhelmine era with the masculinized, selfi sh, sexually liberated, and overtly nonreproductive woman of the present. Precisely because of the fl exibility and currency of gender as a signifi er of social arrangements and hierarchies, the masculinization of women provided 1920s German audiences with a means not only of charting social change, but of reimposing traditional societal norms. Introduction | 3

Th e New Woman and the anxieties she came to symbolize were hardly unique to Germany in the 1920s. A host of studies published in recent decades confi rms that this interwar female “type” could be found everywhere from Europe to North America, and from Australia to Japan. Yet despite a relative unity of appear- ance—the short Bubikopf haircut favored by 1920s German women was said, for example, to have originated in Paris, while fashions such as straight-waisted dresses and tuxedo jackets were popular on both sides of the Atlantic—nation- ally specifi c factors and experiences led to vastly diff erent interpretations of this fi gure in diff erent cultural contexts. Th us Mary Louise Roberts emphasizes the devastation of World War I in her study of women in 1920s France, Liz Conor thematizes colonialist interactions with indigenous populations in her study of the Modern Girl in the Australian media, and the late nineteenth-century femi- nist movement is central to both Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s and Laura Behling’s studies of the new or “masculine” woman in North America.1 Th is volume contributes to this growing body of research with a close ex- amination of the German context, and diff ers from existing analyses of the New Woman and gender relations in Weimar Germany in two major ways. Firstly, it is the only study to engage in a sustained way with discourses of the “masculin- ization” of the modern woman, which cultural histories of this period frequently mention but rarely examine in detail. Th is focus is informed by Judith Halbers- tam’s study of “female masculinity,” in which she articulates the analytical advan- tages of examining masculinity separate from its supposedly “natural” location, the male body.2 Secondly, this study redresses the marginalization of nonhetero- sexual women and genders within research on interwar Germany, where “queer” genders and sexualities have all too often been relegated to separate—albeit pio- neering—studies focusing exclusively on homosexual subcultures or texts. By contrasting mainstream representations of gender circulating in 1920s German popular culture with depictions of bodies and relationships that did not conform to societal norms of binary gender or heterosexuality, this book sheds light on the breadth and complexity of female masculinities circulating within Weimar society. Germany in 1925 was a nation slowly and bitterly coming to terms with its defeat in World War I and the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, a society experimenting with its fi rst attempt at political democracy, plagued by ongoing economic and political insecurities, including the revolutionary unrest of 1918/19 and the hyperinfl ation of 1923, and facing unprecedented levels of social, cultural, and demographic transformation. Conservative forces saw the newly formed republic and its constitution as symptomatic of national decline, and although anxieties about national weakness and sterility also resonated in other national contexts at this period, in Germany this crisis of masculinity ac- quired particular intensity following the war defeat. With millions of men dead and millions more wounded or suff ering from mental illness, “(e)ven where men’s 4 | Th e Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany bodies remained intact—and the injuries infl icted by the new technology were appalling—male gender identity was in tatters.”3 With so many men unfi t to carry out their patriarchal duties as fathers and husbands, concerns about Germa- ny’s emasculated manhood and uncertain reproductive future were compounded by women’s increasing movement into social and political life. After the war, young women and men began to swarm from the provinces to the cities in search of work, many of them joining the expanding ranks of white-collar clerical and service sector workers theorized by Siegfried Kracauer in his 1929 study Die Angestellten (Th e Salaried Masses).4 Th is demographic shift formed part of Germany’s much larger transformation into an industrialized, rationalized, technologized, and consumer-based economy, rapidly replacing the pre-capitalist, agricultural structures of the prewar era. Enjoying an increase in leisure time within this newly rationalized economy, many Germans turned to new forms of recreational activity that would enable them to forget the hor- rors of war and celebrate their newfound consumer freedoms. Jazz dances, the cinema, fi ve o’clock teas, radio, popular magazines, and mass sporting events came to characterize the “Golden Twenties,” as did the stern, modernist lines of the Bauhaus design school, the pragmatic, unsentimental tones of the New Ob- jectivity movement in literature, theater, and fi lm, or the paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz of a decadent and sexualized Berlin metropolis. Even though many of these cultural products remained out of reach for large sections of the population, who struggled on a daily basis with unemployment, poverty, and domestic responsibilities, such images continue to dominate cultural histories of the Weimar period. And no other fi gure has been seen to more closely embody the spirit and adventurousness of this new era than the sexually and fi nancially independent New Woman in her tailored suits and Bubikopf crop. From images of in top hat and tails to the Taylorized synchronicity of mass female dance troupes such as the Tiller Girls, from female aviators fl ying solo around the world to the masses of young women workers streaming along the streets of the metropolis, this new female “type” occupies a crucial place in popu- lar imaginings of pre-Nazi Germany. Yet it is important to ask just who this “New” woman was, and to what extent she refl ected the reality of German women’s lives at this time. Certainly, women were participating in unprecedented numbers in the new, rationalized economies of work and leisure as employees, consumers, social commentators, authors, ac- tors, and artists. Historians of Weimar women’s work have shown, however, that despite widespread concerns that women (and especially married women) were taking men’s jobs, the rationalization of the workplace did not greatly increase their overall presence in the paid labor force, which remained at just over a third of the female population, and that women’s involvement in wartime industries was followed by attempts to restore prewar gender roles. Despite formal politi- cal advancements, therefore, many women’s experiences continued to be defi ned Introduction | 5 primarily by domestic responsibilities and constrained by assumptions based on class, race, marital status, and age. Perceptions of changing gender roles in soci- ety, then, may well have had more to do with the increasing visibility of women in the workplace than a marked increase in participation: in the reorganized labor market of the post–World War I era, women’s jobs became a more distinct and socially visible category as many women moved from domestic and agricultural work in the provinces to industrial and white-collar jobs in the cities.5 Employment conditions were not the only factors prompting a review of women’s role in interwar German society. Other hotly discussed issues included the “surplus” of women of marriageable age as a result of the high numbers of male war casualties, which increased the necessity of self-subsistence even among women who might have otherwise chosen traditional family forms; the declining birth rate and high number of abortions, both of which were frequently inter- preted in the Weimar media as evidence of women’s rejection of marriage and family; the entrance of small numbers of women into the universities and profes- sions such as law and medicine; and an increasingly visible homosexual presence and subculture, particularly in the Berlin metropolis, the center of the world’s fi rst organized homosexual emancipation movement. Formal political gains also played an important role, with female suff rage and women’s equality with men enshrined in the Constitution of 1919. Th is extension of democratic citizenship rights to women, which prompted unprecedented female political involvement and identifi cation, particularly in the early years following the war, helps to mark the birth of the Weimar Republic as “a rupture in the history of both German civil society and German gender relations.”6 In the wake of such achievements, the bourgeois feminist movement of the late nineteenth century had become a relatively weak political force by the 1920s, its “bluestocking” members generally portrayed in the contemporary press as dowdy, elitist, man-hating spinsters who had been all but replaced by the mass phenomenon of the cosmopolitan postwar “New” woman.7 Yet older feminist discourses, as well as stereotypes of female emancipists, continued to feed into 1920s representations of women in important ways. In particular, Weimar-era discussions of women’s “masculinization” often drew on older associations be- tween feminism and sex-gender “inversion,” or the sexological idea of a “third sex,” discussed below. Furthermore, certain aspects of the women’s rights cause were taken up by other groups at this period with new vigor. Th e Sex Reform movement, for example, was active in the publication of “enlightenment litera- ture” (Aufklärungsliteratur) promoting contraception and sexual satisfaction for young married couples. Meanwhile, socialist feminists championed issues that were seen to particularly oppress working-class women, including access to safe and legal abortion as well as relationship forms such as “companionate marriage” that resisted patriarchal and capitalist hierarchies and soon enjoyed considerable popularity among the youth of the new republic.8 6 | Th e Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany

Typologies of the Weimar New Woman

Even though the masculine woman dominated much Weimar commentary on women and gender roles, she was not always synonymous with the “New” woman, who was rarely understood as a single or homogenous “type.” In fact, scholars agree that the New Woman was a remarkably diverse signifi er who could be positioned as anything from rationalized worker to housewife, “new” mother to consumer, Olympic athlete to female fl âneur: “Th is New Woman was not merely a media myth or a demographer’s paranoid fantasy, but a social reality. … She existed in offi ce and factory, bedroom and kitchen, just as surely as in café, and fi lm.”9 Th e factor unifying the multiple and often contradictory ac- counts of this cultural phenomenon is her role as a symbol of transformation and rupture: she represented a “crisis” in gender roles that was, in turn, a response to the “shock of modernity.”10 Th e 1920s German media refl ects a population seeking ways to reinstate a sense of order in their rapidly changing and often apparently incoherent soci- ety, and Lynne Frame has shown that detailed systems of categorization played an important role in this process. In particular, she demonstrates how the ap- pearance and lifestyle of the New Woman constituted a favorite subject of this taxonomizing impulse, serving “as a barometer of modern society, its progress and its discontents.”11 Accordingly, a newspaper article published in 1927 delin- eated three key female types: the Germanic “Gretchen” with her long, virginal braid, the youthful and Americanized “Girl,” whose carefree, athletic typecasting made her the German equivalent of the sporty Anglo-American fl apper, and the cosmopolitan, boyish, and sharply dressed “Garçonne.” Although media reports suggest that the Girl was the most numerous social type, her popularity linked to that of dancing troupes such as the Tiller Girls, it was the Garçonne who was seen to represent the most masculine and historically advanced form of female development, with a sexual and intellectual potency that “often gives rise to con- fl ict. … Uniting a sporting, comradely male entrepreneurial sense with heroic, feminine devotion, this synthesis—if successful—often makes her so superior to the man she loves that she becomes troublesome.”12 Other prominent female types in the German media of this period include the tragic proletarian mother of communist publications, the athletic “Sportsgirl,” the upper-class “English girl,” and the sexually dangerous and vehemently nonreproductive “vamp” or femme fatale, exemplifi ed in contemporary fi lm roles such as Louise Brooks’s Lulu in Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, dir. G. W. Pabst, 1929), or Marlene Dietrich’s man-eating Lola Lola in Josef von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel (Th e Blue Angel, 1930). Th roughout this study, it will be essential to distinguish between the sym- bolic role of such gendered types and their mediated relationship to real bodies and people, as I examine how discourses surrounding the “masculinization” of Introduction | 7 women were employed by Weimar commentators as both metaphor for and mir- ror of social change. Th us the fi rst chapter on women’s fashions shows that to- ward the end of the Weimar era the sexually naïve Gretchen type was increasingly pitted against the cosmopolitan Garçonne in debates about “ideal” womanhood. Whereas the Gretchen stereotype came to symbolize all-German, anti-industri- alist, and anti-republic sentiments, the masculinized Garçonne, named after a 1922 novel by French author Victor Margueritte, represented the epitome of not only modern womanhood but modern, industrialized society—a product of the social and gender role changes set in train by the war. As one commentator observed: “(I)t was the war that brought about, unnoticed at fi rst, the birth of the Garçonne type. Th e woman on the battlefi eld, who put on a uniform and cut off her hair, was the fi rst to want to share not only the fate, but also the appearance of men.”13 In the early to mid 1920s, the Garçonne featured in the Weimar media as a modern, fashionable version of masculinized womanhood, whose erotic appeal lay not least in her intellectual qualities and cool approach to men and sexuality: “She never falls in love, enjoys a good time every once in a while, and constantly compromises herself. … But when she is alone, she can do without man and makeup very well.”14 Her edginess contrasted favorably with what many were be- ginning to describe as the mass uniformity and superfi ciality of the Girl. Yet more than with any other female type, the concerted modernity and independence of the Garçonne also led critics to associate her with negative discourses of gender “inversion” and sexual “perversion,” arguing that the New Woman was taking her newfound freedoms too far. In light of this independent, cosmopolitan, gender-bending image, it is hardly surprising that the Garçonne aesthetic proved particularly appealing to members of the female homosexual subculture that began to fl ourish during the Weimar era. From 1930 to 1932 she lent her name to a popular homosexual women’s magazine, and from 1931 onward to a Berlin women’s club in the Kalckreuth- straße. She was not, however, the only female “type” popular in subcultural circles at this period; these ranged from the feminine homosexual vamp to the masculine “Gentleman” or “Gigolo.”15 Th is rapid increase in specifi cally lesbian aesthetic models formed part of a larger boom in what might today be termed “queer” cultural and political activity, particularly in the metropolis of Berlin. Despite the ongoing legal prohibition on male homosexuality under Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code—a target of homosexual rights activism in Germany since the turn of the century—the 1920s saw the development of a multifaceted homosexual rights movement centered in Berlin, as well as a veritable explo- sion of bars, clubs, and organizations catering to homosexuals and transvestites. Berlin’s female homosexual scene boasted up to fi fty clubs during this period, the diversity of which was chronicled in the paintings of Jeanne Mammen and in Ruth Roellig’s 1928 study lesbische Frauen (Berlin’s Lesbian Women).16 Meanwhile, lesbian artists such as cabaret singer Claire Waldoff and erotic dancer